My family and I immigrated here to Australia in 2001. We immediately faced the racist rhetoric of the Howard era which played a part in my parents becoming committed Labor voters. My family’s story is hardly unique– Labor relies on the votes of ethnically diverse communities. Yet many of us feel we are not served by Labor governments.
Federal seats such as Barton, Watson, Blaxland, and Fowler with diverse populations have been taken for granted by Labor. Each of these seats have electoral margins favouring Labor at well over 10%. This is mirrored in the New South Wales Parliament with the safest Labor seats residing in Western Sydney.
There has always existed a wide gap between the elites of the party and the regular members who join branches and unions, i.e. the rank-and-file. Labor’s decisions to suspend rank-and-file preselections in ethnically diverse electorates at the previous Federal election proved disastrous and have only widened the gap.
At the 2022 Federal election Kristina Kenneally was parachuted from her residence in the Northern Beaches into the division of Fowler located in south-west Sydney following the retirement of the then incumbent Chris Hayes. The rank-and-file and the retiring Hayes backed Tu Le, a Vietnamese-Australian lawyer and community activist. Around 19% of the division of Fowler has Vietnamese heritage. Fowler was also a safe Labor seat with a margin of 14% in no small part due to its ethnic diversity.
The decision to impose Kenneally on a lower house seat was a result of her losing out on a winnable spot on the Senate ticket. In essence, factional machinations trumped the desires of the local community. Labor couldn’t possibly lose a seat they’ve held since the electorate’s inception, right? The rest is history, with the independent Dai Le narrowly winning the seat.
When Julie Owens, MP for Parramatta, announced that she would not contest the 2022 Federal election, she expressed her desire that the next Labor candidate for Parramatta be determined by a rank-and-file ballot. The Labor executive however saw fit to parachute Accenture executive Andrew Charlton from his $16 million mansion in the Eastern Suburbs into Parramatta. Unlike Fowler, the Labor margin for Parramatta was an uncomfortable 3.5%.
Understandably, the local branches were enraged and wrote to Labor’s national executive calling for a rank-and-file preselection. Parramatta locals considered for preselection included Durga Owen, a law lecturer at Western Sydney University who arrived in Australia a Tamil refugee; Alan Mascarenhas, the son of Indian migrants and the vice president of the Parramatta branch; and Abha Devasia, a lawyer for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Research is clear that electorates prefer local candidates, while parachutes come with the risk of alienating the voter base. In Fowler’s case, the electorate punished Labor for ushering in a white woman residing in the Northern Beaches to replace the daughter of Vietnamese refugees.
Parliamentary representation of people with non-European ancestry in Australia lags behind other Anglophone nations. This reality isn’t even as jarring and unjust as the dismal state of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation in Parliament. Where New Zealand reserves positions for Māori representatives, in Australia we cannot even pass a referendum to give a paltry advisory body to our First Nations.
The NSW Labor party officially puts its membership count at around ten to fifteen thousand, however, the actual size is much smaller. The institutional structure of the party is deeply undemocratic, where key decision makers are determined by backroom deals. The gulf between divisions and Canberra, the discrepancy between the electorates and Macquarie Street, have never been wider. If Labor is not even willing to bridge the gulf between parliament and the branches, how could they hope to bridge the gulf between themselves and their electorate? Trust between the rank and file and the leadership has eroded. Rank and file members of branches and unions are considered entries on a spreadsheet and are most often excluded from decision-making.
Is it any surprise that Labor’s electoral base is deserting them, given their complicity in Gaza’s ongoing genocide, increased neoliberal policies during a cost-of-living crisis, and austerity measures on the NDIS?
Labor’s federal 2022 and NSW 2023 victories were the result of the Liberal Party being voted out and not Labor being voted in. If Labor hopes to retain government in the coming decades, there is only one course of action: listen to the rank and file. I am not certain they will do that, but I am certain that if they do not, they will be punished routinely by the electorate.
